The former Stuttgart full-back, who has been capped eight times by Germany, has signed a two-year deal with the Champions League participants and will link up with his new team-mates on Friday.

"We've got an experienced, attack-minded right full-back in Roberto Hilbert," said Leverkusen's general manager Wolfgang Holzhauser.

"He has international experience and makes us tactically more flexible, particularly down the right."

Hilbert, 28, won the Bundesliga with Stuttgart in 2007 before moving to Turkey in 2010, winning the Turkish cup at the end of his first season with Besiktas.

He now returns to the Bundesliga keen to perform at the highest level once again.

"I'm delighted that this transfer has worked out," he said on his new club's website. "Bayer Leverkusen are a great club who are giving me the chance to prove myself in the Bundesliga and also in the Champions League."

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t's wrong to be making a joke out of Bender's name at the expense of gay people. It's the kind of childish, uncivilised thing that Football365 would deride and ridicule if it was another media outlet saying. Why is there a need for jokes like this? Does it make your writers feel like men? F365 might suggest that I 'lighten up', but it is genuinely traumatic for people who have been oppressed all their lives to be the butt of jokes, and to be told...

ou can't blame De Gea for wanting to leave, he has enough to do in front of goal as it is as well as taking on the role of Man Utd's version of Derek Acorah in trying to contact and organise a defence that isn't there.